The
compilers of this slick tome seem deeply upset by the success of the
magnificent Group of Seven exhibition organised to mark the 75th
anniversary of the Group’s first exhibition in 1996 and the equally
magnificent Tom Thomson exhibition of 2002. The former was apparently
“seriously misleading and deeply insensitive”. They are particularly
upset that the exhibitions were accompanied by lovely big books with
many more nice pictures than this one.

The
Group of Seven, Tom Thomson and similar Canadian landscape painters you
see did not just paint pretty pictures. They were emptying the North of
its native people and claiming it for capitalist exploitation. Indeed
the theory is that all landscape painting is just a claim for new rights
to own land following on the decline of feudalism.

Critical
theories have been multiplying in the academy since the 1960s but they
do not seem to have put a dent on public appreciation of Thomson and the
rest. Even more scandalously the market for their works has never been
stronger. Beyond Wilderness vainly tries to correct this situation.

After
the compilers’ introductions, which give their message loud and clear,
the book is a jumble of short pieces, a few specially commissioned, and a
few included to show what the post-modern crusaders are up against.

Much
of it serves as a sampler of current academic writing in what pleases
to call itself cultural studies. The important thing is not to make an
argument, still less to lay out facts, but to invoke a theory and apply
it to any old thing, in the instance Canadian landscape painting. You
pick up the lingo: “privileged forms in a pervasive discourse of social
management”; “landscape as a category not only symbolizes but enacts
colonialist desire.” You throw in the odd “imbrication”, invoke Michel
Foucault and Fredric Jameson. When invoking authorities big names are
not necessary and indeed are best used sparingly. When expounding a
theory it is enough that anyone has published a similar theory. For
people who stopped thinking years ago a reference to a theory takes the
place of thinking. That it is all drivel, right back to Foucault, hardly
matters.

There
are also accounts of or, to the extent possible with what is to some
extent conceptual art, illustrations of, what the compilers believe is
corrective art for our times. Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale,
which he modestly proposed as “a gigantic landscape film equal in terms
of film to the great landscape paintings of Cézanne, Poussin, Corot,
Monet, Matisse and in Canada the Group of Seven” is reverently
described. It “has been hailed as a ‘masterpiece’” by Paul Virilio, the
noted dromologist, no less. Three hours of edited footage from a camera
installed somewhere north of Sept-Îles it has scandalously failed to
catch on with the benighted art loving public. Iain and Ingrid Baxter’s
humourless jokes as N. E. Thing Company “poked gentle fun at existing
boundaries in order to improve the quality of life for themselves and
others while inadvertently leaving a partial social document of their
hybrid and polymorphic milieu.” These and Greg Curnoe’s literally
hateful anti-American “Amendments to a Continental Refusal” have dated
as much as platform shoes and disco. The Group of Seven, while obviously
old, have not dated any more than Ruisdael. That’s what’s so annoying.

All these and the other newer, more correct, artists featured in Beyond Wilderness
have received official patronage as Tom Thomson and the Group did. The
1993 Michael Snow Project of the Art Gallery of Ontario was as
unmissable as the Group of Seven show three years later. Snow’s sometime
wife Joyce Wieland got the full treatment from the National Gallery in
1971 and from the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1987. But they have not
taken with the public.

Thomson
and the Group are condemned as notoriously dead white males and
Anglo-Saxon Protestants to boot. Three of them were actually born in
Britain! On the basis of Lawren Harris’ reference to “the great North
and its living whiteness” Scott Watson condemns them all as racists. The
post-modernists detect a puritanical strain in their work, which is odd
coming from people so puritanical themselves. They do not actually
adjure us not to enjoy the Group’s paintings but their theoretical
sensors are ever alert to the post-modern equivalents of sin,
privileging, colonialism, Othering. They are the precisians of art. The
moral tone is undermined by sneering, “Thomson and his cronies”, and
cheap shots. John O’Brian reports the perfectly meaningless fact that A.
Y. Jackson’s “Terre Sauvage” was painted in a studio above a bank branch.

The
book takes a naively accepting line on multi-culturalism. In 1971 PET
decreed multi-culturalism, and it was good. Questions of what exactly it
means and what is good and what may be bad about it, which exercise
academic colleagues of many of the contributors, are never addressed.
The important thing is that the old painters were “white bread” and out
they must go.

There
is a strain of Marxisant paranoia in the book. Elite patrons and arts
bureaucrats seem to conspire to foist the Group of Seven on the masses
to sustain their colonialist capitalist ascendancy. Or am I guilty of a
kind of intentionalist fallacy, thinking that people must mean what they
do or do what they mean. It is conceded that “many members of the Group
[might not] be altogether sympathetic to the ideological edifice that
has been erected in their name.” But that will not get them off the
hook. And the banker and Maecenas Sir Edmund Walker may have meant well
in promoting Canadian art but he was an agent of capitalism and
colonialism all the same.

Oddly, the only straightforward art appreciation in the book comes from Barry Lord’s silly Maoist The History of Painting in Canada: Toward a People’s Art.
The compilers are rather condescending to Lord, whose old hat Marxism
has been left behind by Marxisant post-moderns. Lord allowed that the
Group represented a national bourgeoisie, progressive in its time,
before it was overcome by the compradors of capitalist imperialism. He
can therefore write unaffectedly that in J. E. H. Macdonald “Leaves in
the Brook” “The rich colour and rapid movement are conveyed to us with
all the freshness of the original autumn scene.”

Many of the pieces in Beyond Wilderness
have been severely edited. The late Robert Stacey’s deeply informed and
argued “The Myth - and Truth - of the True North” is cut off less than a
third of the way through when his defence of the Group has barely
started. Perhaps other contributions would be more insightful and
persuasive if given in full. Most don’t get beyond striking a pose.

For
their purposes the compilers and most of the contributors exaggerate
the importance of the empty wilderness in Canadian art. You would not
guess from their book that Lawren Harris painted many townscapes, which,
dare I say, sell very well. The auction record for a Group of Seven
painting is held by Harris’ “Pine Tree and Red House, Winter, City
Painting II” at $2,875,000. It does have a tree and snow in it.

The callow prejudice that passes for insight in Beyond Wilderness
is typified by the compilers bald statement that “The concept of
northern development has decidedly negative connotations today...”. That
would be leaving aside the fact that there would be no paper to print
their book on without northern development and much less wealth to tax
to keep them and their contributors and the new artists they promote.

Benedict
Anderson, the New Left Marxist and leading critical theorist of
nationalism attended a symposium that was part of the “OH! Canada
Project” staged by the Art Gallery of Ontario as a defensive gesture at
the time of the 1996 Group of Seven exhibition. Much thanks they got for
it. An excerpt from Anderson’s paper is included in Beyond Wilderness.
If the compilers and contributors are uncritically accepting of
multi-culturalism they are completely at sea about nationalism. They
want to reject Old Canada nationalism but the whole structure of support
for the arts and academic study of Canada rests on a national ambition
for Canada, the belief that a nation must have its art and
self-understanding to the end that we can imagine our national
community.

No
doubt there is something to be written about the reasons for and the
limitations of the Canadian attachment to the rough sublime of the
North. As the compilers and contributors allow, the appeal of the
paintings partly expresses and reflects Canadians’ consciousness of
Canada’s vastness and complex relations to it. When it comes to the
paintings they must be looked at closely to see their complexity and
with respect for the achievement of Thomson and the Group and their
contemporaries that won them their place ahead of their predecessors and
still at the peak of Canada’s art. Marxisant reductions and processing
by theory blind them to what the great public happily sees.